life expectancy of repaceable tips on chainsaw bars

[WV_hillbilly]

Just wondering how many hours you pros get out of a replaceable tip on your saws with everyday use .
Yesterday I had the sprocket lock up on a factory Husky 24 "bar that had about 100 hours of run time . It was on a 372 XP . I have never had this happen before. I was blocking clean wood that had been piled up  . I clean the oil groove out every time I change chains and give the sprocket a shot of grease everyday before starting to cut .Luckily I had bought a replacement tip at Paul Bunyon show this year .

[John Mc]

Any chance the tip got pinched some where along the way

[bill m]

I have never greased the tip on a bar and haven't replaced the tip in about 2 years.

[WV_hillbilly]

hasn't been pinched that I know of and not many plunge cuts recently .   

[Gearbox]

I do all the things you are not to do with a saw . Plunge cutting , under cutting with tip and many others . I have never replaced or blown a tip in 50 years or more of logging and firewood .  ??chain sharp all the time ,dirt . operator error ,bar oil , wrong chain or bar ?

[ehp]

most likely just a bad tip, I donot grease them either , in this sand greasing them shortens the tips life . I find the bigger the horsepower the shorter the bar tips last , 100 cc ported saws in the cold winter time you do well for a tip to last 50 hours and does not matter who makes it , I use to buy tips 10 at a time just to have lots on hand but now I'm running 70 to 80 cc ported saws and donot have much tip trouble .

[HolmenTree]

Factory Husqvarna replaceable tip bars in North American are rebadged Oregon PowerMatch.
Good strong well made bars but with the tip's side plates pinched in a binding cut and the chain still rotating can heat up the sprocket enough to split it releasing the roller bearings.
The 372XP is strong enough to keep the chain rotating in this condition and the operator may not even notice it.
I have burnt a few tips this way with my old 064 and 066, but only when delimbing hardwood.
Delimbing hardwood trees is like another form of bucking, with the weight of the stem producing many different binding tensions in the limbs.

[DelawhereJoe]

Just move to a duromatic bar and never have to worry about blowing out a sprocket  nose again.

[WV_hillbilly]

 At first I thought I burnt up the clutch too  .I was in a cut and the chain just locked up  and the clutch started smoking .  I have never locked up  or blown a tip before and have wore out 2 dozen bars in the last 20 years cutting firewood so this was a first .  all of my smaller saws have hard nosed bars this is my only saw with replaceable tips in 20, 24,and 28" lengths

[luvmexfood]

Don't do the ignorant thing I did. Had a tip lock up on me. Cheaper bar so I took the roller out and was using it. Sucked the chain  up into the bar. It wedged the bar apart and I liked to never have got it out of the tree which was down. Even picked the tree up with a dozer and shook it. We live and we learn.

[OH logger]

one thing NOT  to do is  after you put on a new bar after blowin out the tip  and continue cutting do NOT put the saw in the same kerf as the kerf you blew out the tip in. all the metal parts of the bearing are still in the cut and will dull the heck out of the chain. I only replace the tip IF the bar is still in really good shape. tips are getting so expensive and if the bar is not in pretty good shape it makes more sense to start with a good bar. but that's just my 1 cent  ;D

[Al_Smith]

I think in all the years I've only blown one tip on a non replaceable tip Oregon bar on a Mac PM 610 .I used that thing for years and years and likely wore out a bucket full of chain loops before the tip went .

At one time Oregon had a packaged deal they called a "cord cutter " One bar,two chains,file and guide holder ,semi chisel.They figured with two chains you could change them out and get a cord before you had to file .That's the bar I ran for so long .

Now it might be such a thing that having been used to hard tipped bars I run a sprocket nose probably a little looser than most.That might be why I get so long out of a bar . Debatable I suppose like everything else .

[DelawhereJoe]

On my old 026 I used to use up a bar about every 3 years or so, but it has no where near the power of your 372. It was my limbing and small tree saw, to my 041 it was a lite weight. My 041 never used up a bar, an old durimatic, not a spek of paint left on it anywhere. The bars on the 026 were just the Lowes specials, Oregon bars and a yellow label Stihl chain. Never greased a sprocket, would occasionally cut into the leaf litter, cut a stump out and never blew a nose out. Sounds like you had a bad nose.

[WV_hillbilly]

I put the new nose on and ran it for 6 hrs today seems ok

[sandsawmill14]

we used to blow them fairly often on the old 1050 supers but thats been so long ago i suspect the roller tips were fairly new  ??? other than that i can only remeber one going bad and i let a tree set back and pinch it early that morning and it gave up after lunch :

[ehp]

you get a saw with lots of power and in pretty cold weather say 30 below or colder and deep snow  and cutting bigger hard maple and that type of timber you will blow tips all the time , I have seen lots of weeks you blow 3 tips , I think the cold and the snow has lots to do with the tip blowing

[JohnW]

you get a saw with lots of power and in pretty cold weather say 30 below or colder and deep snow  and cutting bigger hard maple and that type of timber you will blow tips all the time , I have seen lots of weeks you blow 3 tips , I think the cold and the snow has lots to do with the tip blowing

Interesting.  And there's another reason not to cut when it's 30 below.

[ehp]

and you carry at least 6 chains with you cause your going to need them  8), the drivers donot like the colder either and break, during the warmer months you hardly ever break a chain but in the real cold they break all the time

[HolmenTree]

and you carry at least 6 chains with you cause your going to need them  8), the drivers donot like the colder either and break, during the warmer months you hardly ever break a chain but in the real cold they break all the time

How long have you been logging Ed? :D

Winters up here are alot warmer then it was 25-30 yrs ago.
But I can tell you back in the cold 1980's winters when I was cut and skid logging spruce and jack pine, I never had to carry extra chains or had a problem with them breaking.
When I started field testing the then new Oregon 73LG chain in the winter of 1980-81, I was sitting on a stump touching up my 73LP chain and it was about 35 below.
This big burly guy walks up over dressed and his beard and glasses were covered with frost. I recognized him from a pic in Chainsaw Age magazine.
I said to him "Your Gary Walrath the world champion hot saw guy aren't you?"
He said " Yes how did you know?"
I replied "I heard from some of the guys from the other camp that there's a sasquatch from Oregon who's bringing a new chisel chain for us to test."

Big Gary laughed so hard the snow almost fell out of the tree next to him.

The following winters big Gary brought out more products to test. Most notably the PowerMatch bars, radial port rim sprockets and files.

Upon moving our camp further north to Thompson,Manitoba some of the December and January months we had 40 below every day for weeks on end so we had no choice and had to keep cutting especially weeks before Christmas.
And as I said  we had no chain breaking problems.

We also felled alot of the weed trees like frozen birch and poplar in 30-40 below.

Some of my best production days were in these temperatures.
Spruce limbs snap off like magic and by the time the skidder gets the load to the landing, the  topped treelength logs look like masts for a sailing ship

[ehp]

I started cutting in the bush a long time ago and before the 80's , big difference in softwood or aspen , when your cutting big maple, oak birch you put a lot more stress on the bar and chain in those temps plus add in 3 plus feet of snow and the saw is never out of the snow as your stumps have to be 12 inches or less in height

[HolmenTree]

I started cutting in the bush a long time ago and before the 80's , big difference in softwood or aspen , when your cutting big maple, oak birch you put a lot more stress on the bar and chain in those temps plus add in 3 plus feet of snow and the saw is never out of the snow as your stumps have to be 12 inches or less in height

I started working cut and skid for the company in 1974 when I was 16. That would make you 11 years old then Ed.  :(

We don't get the snow you guys get out east. But we still have knee deep snow that stays from November to April though. 
You can't compare your trees to ours as ours is alot slower growing and harder. Your white pine is soft , our jack pine , white and black spruce is alot harder. Along with tamarack and black and white poplar. Our white birch when frozen throws sparks from the b/c.

Our spruce, poplar can get up to 36"dbh or bigger. Birch I cut alot of 20". We cut our stumps near ground level, if I left a 12" stump my skidder operator would run me over :D

Limbing and topping frozen spruce is hard on the chain (try and chop a spruce knot with a racing axe and see what happens :D)

When I was on the safety committee  I did monthly safety tours of the crews. The only broken chains I saw was when they were run on worn out sprockets or improper  filing. Don't matter if if it's cutting in 40 below.

[ehp]

I started cutting cedar fence post a 6 years old , I sold firewood during the winter time that same year and ran the saw myself . I went full time skidding at 10 year old when not in school , had my own crew at 12 that I was in charge of when not in school, that right 12 years old . And the next day after I finished school I had 37 men and 7 skidders to look after and did that for years . You cannot compare cutting aspen or spruce to hard maple that's an average of 3 ft or bigger on the stump , its totally to different worlds , aspen and white pine and spruce is soft like a weed , now try cutting hard maple in -40C with the wood having a high amount of frozen water crystals in it and see how the chain stands that . now where I log now is totally different , same tree names but wood is a lot softer mainly cause it grows a lot faster and its not as cold . I have not broken a chain in years here and hardly ever blow a tip but am smart enough to know if I ever went back up there logging I would have no less than 5 new bars and chains in my truck at all times just for me

[HolmenTree]

Great stories Ed ...hahahahahahah

The way you were talking earlier you were breaking chains left and right in 40 below.

With our long cold temps our trees freeze solid. And I dropped thousands of cords of frozen birch at 40 below ....with a 90cc 'sered  or a 064 pulling a 18-20" 3/8 chain ...wasn't breaking chains like you said. :D

[Al_Smith]

 :D Come on you two,minus 40 degrees and you were playing Paul Bunyan in the woods ,really now .The coldest I've ever experienced was 42 below F but that was above the  arctic circle on the polar ice cap .I wasn't cutting wood either nor did I stay out too long .Only a polar bear would stay out in weather like that and that's because they don't know any better .

[sawguy21]

 :D :D